Page 23 of Up from the Earth (Equinox Seasons Duet #1)

Twenty-Two

Cauldrons Are A Place Where What Goes In Does Not Come Out The Same.

D arkness had become a familiar bedfellow. I recognized it, understood its purpose in the scheme of the universe. I saw my spouse in it. I saw parts of myself there, and I could accept it as the end. And yet, I remained. There was not a door past the World of Below. It was the ultimate destination of all spirits before and after their existence on the mortal realm. So then, where was I?

There was only black around me, but I had some notion of standing. I was standing, my feet pressed against something solid. There were no shapes to make out, no light, and I could look down and see nothing of my body.

Cern had perished right next to me, and he was not in this place. I was alone. Was this to be my fate? A being that was not quite mortal and not quite divine struck down and left to dwell in the void of all things. I could not have that. I would not survive it, at least not this part of me that lingered.

These ordered thoughts would turn to madness and I would be nothing more than a shade of suffering and pain.

A change. Something to my right changed . It wavered in the black like something hidden in the murky waters of a lake. There and gone so quickly, but I felt it. I waited several long moments, eons for all I knew, and it did not repeat.

The madness begins already. I am alone in the dark and going mad.

My essence diminished, retreating somewhere inside itself to become smaller. It appeared that I could close my vision to his realm, like shutting my eyelids if I still had them. There was no breath to sigh out, and it was all I sought to do.

“Are you? Are you indeed?”

I jerked into attention. I had not hallucinated that. There was a voice, the echo of it still dancing around the endless expanse surrounding me.

“H-Hello?” I could speak.

Expecting nothing and everything at once, I hung on edge, waiting for a response. I couldn’t track time or distance here, and the perimeter of darkness felt like a curved bubble stretching out into infinity around me.

Thump.

Was it a feeling? A sound? Perhaps a bit of both, and it pulsed around me. Whatever I was, I could feel it squeeze down just enough and then retreat. It had been soft but sure. Had I heard that movement? Was there truly movement at all?

Thump .

“Hello?!”

My voice rang through the abyss, distorting with each replay until it became one I didn’t recognize. Or did I? It was feminine. My Queen? But no, that wasn’t it. Softness, a deep tone accompanied by the bark of dogs. Then an accented tone that carried warmth and growth. It was so similar to another that reverberated around and around and around.

“Hello.”

That one was solid, a woman’s voice. It was so like my own, but…older.

I blinked, something still available to me apparently, and there it was again. That shimmering like light through dark waters. Focusing on it, I rushed forward, propelling myself with the power of pure intent. The hazy array grew closer, and I could pick out more of it—a reflection cast on a black surface.

She was me…but not. Fair hair draped down slim shoulders, a dress of gossamer and endless yard of thin fabric hung from her body, and the swell of her round belly was shielded by her delicate hand.

“Who are you?”

“Who are you ?” That mirror reply came back at me again, but the inflection had changed.

I met the eyes staring back at me, one green and one blue. But she was older. She was pregnant. I was not these things.

“Aren’t you?”

She spoke alone, and I cocked my head, taken aback. What was I looking at? Who was this blurry, wavering image of a woman?

“You ask what you already know.” The reflection cocked her head in a similar fashion, and I still knew that there was nothing of me to reflect. “Do not resist or rationalize. Give in.”

Sucking in something that could not be air into my not-lungs, I focused in on her image. She was familiar, a mirror of myself. The hair and form, but she was someone else as well. A stronger nose, a prouder stance. I could feel the life-giving essence seep from her and into what would have been my bones. I could sense the proximity to death that she existed near.

“A goddess…of spring?”

“You are getting closer.” The grin that spread across her face was wicked and wise, her youthful glow beaming from her even as I noticed again her rounded shape. “But perhaps, it is because you need to see the rest of us.”

Near her, curved through the reflecting light almost as if looking into a concave mirror, appeared more shapes, diluted and shifting but there. In fact, more women stood next to her with their same features and like facets. Pale hair melted into dark, smooth faces melted into those with wrinkles. But they were all the same, this essence of the natural order tied to the three phases—maiden, mother, crone.

I was them. I was a part of these beings who had come before and would be here long after.

My chest, still invisible in the dark, warmed. It was neither pleasant nor uncomfortable, but a place in the middle which I feared could dip in either direction.

“You were never just Cerridwen, don’t you see?” The woman in the center spoke along with the two at either end, their three faces versions of the same being. “This is your final moment of truth seeking. A point between two realms to which you both belong.”

“A crossroads?” A grin flickered over her face like torchlight licking across the darkness.

“And a well,” said that first woman, her swelling abdomen suggesting birth was imminent.

As if in response, I could feel the quickening begin, the surges small and low but with the promise to grow. I held her eyes, knowing so innately that life thrived within her, that she could gift that life through the natural order to everything within the mortal realm. A Queen of Birth and Death, a Wife to Beginnings and Endings.

“And aren’t you as well?”

Considering, I nodded. “I suppose. Though my kingdom is dying. I am dead and have left it behind.”

One near the right side shimmered brighter, and then another near the left. They were the same yet different as they all had been—one with tanned skin and intelligent eyes, the other with wild yellow hair and a cunning smile.

“Death is one step on the journey. A part of the grand wheel that turns for all things. Beginnings and endings. Endings and beginnings.” They spoke in unison, and the warmth in my chest swelled. “One cannot be without the other, but …”

The word hung in the air, rippling through matter and space. A humming wormed through my mind, my essence.

“Cycles are not lines, Cerridwen.”

Before me in the air a gold thread materialized, astoundingly bright against the darkness. It stretched through me, far into the distance at my back and even farther into the expanse before me. The two women held up their hands, and then they all did—versions flickering on the edges so that I couldn’t tell how many there were.

In the space between us, the line of thread curved, bowing upward until a loop was formed.

“Cycles are circles. What came before will always come again. Death will be followed by life and life followed by death. For you know the words, Cerridwen. Life, death…”

The ringing in my bones—or what should have been my bones—rattled my entire being. Everything thrummed a droning wail reverberating as it grew louder and louder. Against the noise, my voice would be nothing, and still I spoke.

Rrrummmble .

Smiles and the golden thread shimmered, loops forming around each of the women before me down the line into infinity.

Because I was them. Not by happenstance or similarity. I was each of them and more to come. We were the feminine line that would stretch on. We were the facets of this natural cycle incarnate, and custodian to it all. Fluid shapes, fluid bodies that could change however they needed to. Beings that could be whoever they wanted to be and would remain ever as important to the well.

The cauldron.

I saw my Queen lost among the row of endless faces, for she too—in all their forms—was part of it as well. And they needed me.

“You have lived Cerridwen Adaire Locke. You have given birth, and you have now known death.” A circle formed around me as all the voices spoke as one, the warmth of existence permeating this strange essence of mine. “But there is more. There is yet another step to be taken, and a kingdom to preserve.”

The endless changed. That flickering of light, these shapeless and certain beings around me, altered as one. It was everywhere and nowhere, suffusing my spirit and existing outside of it to pull it forward, to pull it out.

I was in the depths of the well, and I had changed. But this was not the final phase of my existence. I knew now that I had to go back. I would go back.

Because I had and would again. I was the cycle, the circle. And circles have no end.

I was a daughter of spring, and spring was a time of rebirth.